Credible and poignant history limning the dark side of America’s racial past.
From popular historian Packard (Victoria’s Daughters, 1998, etc.), a chronicle of the growth and decline of America’s infamous Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation.
Confronting the ugliness of Jim Crow, the author suggests, is an important first step toward understanding how entrenched racial attitudes function in America today. Packard attacks the foundation of these attitudes by reconstructing 19th-century biblical justifications for racially based slavery, then exposing the fallacies inherent in those arguments. Combined with a southern economic dependence on agriculture, Packard asserts, such shaky arguments were good enough to prompt uneasy acknowledgment of the “peculiar institution” in the North and enthusiastic acceptance in the South. He demonstrates how the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 inflamed racial hatreds that exploded after Reconstruction into the bitter oppression of American blacks. In his exploration of this era, Packard details some of the most wicked laws ever enacted in the US, as well as the appalling fact that the federal government practically sanctioned them following the Supreme Court’s 1896 pronouncement in Plessy v. Ferguson of “separate but equal.” Only after African-Americans performed admirably through two world wars, the author states, did the hypocrisy of Jim Crow racism become visible to America’s white majority. This newfound visibility, according to Packard, made possible the reversal of Jim Crow laws launched by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. White moderates’ rejection of Jim Crow also assisted the modern civil-rights movement in its effort to desegregate schools in the face of southern white hostility. The author concludes this powerful volume by describing the dramatic death knell of legalized Jim Crow, rung by the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Credible and poignant history limning the dark side of America’s racial past.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26122-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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